Beyond The Titanic

Scott Miller's Beyond The Titanic and Supernova are two atmospheric, well-written IF that have sadly been ignored by the gaming public, perhaps due to the fact that their publisher Apogee is better known as an action game publishing house.

Which is a shame, because besides being the very first games Apogee released, they are well-written games with a good parser, in-game help function, and logical puzzles. I also remember these games as being among the first IF to incorporate sound effects and effective use of colored text.

In Beyond The Titanic you're a hapless passenger trying to escape from that ship of doom, while Supernova casts you as a poor miner on a remote space mining colony about to embark on a strange adventure. To their credit, Apogee released both games as freeware in March 1998, although they couldn't find a way to make the games savable to hard drive-- so you still need a floppy to save games.

Review By HOTUD